Title

Authors

Document Type

Article

Publication Version

Version of Record

Publication Date

2000

Abstract

It comes as no surprise that the critical work focusing on Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1933) and Flannery O' Connor's Wise Blood (1952) sheds much light on the motifs satirical and otherwise at work in the novels. However, the film versions of the novels, those by legendary directors John Schlesinger (1969's Midnight Cowboy) and John Huston (1941's The Maltese Falcon), respectively, remain open to investigating how satire works within them. On the one hand, for instance, the popular vein of criticism regarding West and his Hollywood novel seems focused by the Frankfurt school of thought-mostly Adorno, and to a lesser extent, Benjamin (Roberts; Simon; Strychacx). On the other hand, the criticism regarding O'Connor tends to focus on the ambiguities of the novel-some critics, for example, read O'Connor's Wise Blood theme as "the necessity of acknowledging one's spiritual heritage" (Cook, 199).